It was late one afternoon, more years ago than I care to admit. I
was working as an estate agent in South London, when an old beggar
woman came into the front office. “Cross my palm with silver,
Dearie,” she croaked in a strong Irish accent.

I glared at her from my desk. It was hard enough
at the best of times to get potential clients or buyers to step
through our door. The lingering smell she had brought of unwashed
clothes and of the scabby, verminous body they no doubt covered was
unlikely to help. “Get out!” I said, pointing at the door.

Her response was to shamble forward, a sprig of
heather clutched in her hand. Thirty seconds later, she was steadying
herself on the pavement. “You’re a wicked young man,
” she called, “and you’ll be dead in two weeks—you
mark my words.”

“Piss off!” I laughed, dusting my
hands together, “or I’ll set the police on you.”
Back inside I set about looking for the tin of air freshener we kept
for when the smell of tobacco smoke became too oppressive.

This happened a long time ago—much longer
than the two weeks I was given. It did not determine my view of the
occult. It does, even so, illustrate a view I have held since about
the age of ten. During the past four centuries, we have seen the
world in semi-Epicurean terms as a great and internally consistent
machine. To understand it, we observe, we question, we form
hypotheses, we test, we measure, we record, we think again. The
results have long since been plain. In every generation, we have
added vast provinces to the Empire of Science. We do not yet
perfectly understand the world. But the understanding we have has
given us a growing dominion over the world; and there is no reason to
think the growth of our understanding and dominion will not continue
indefinitely.

We reject supernatural explanations partly
because we have no need of them. The world is a machine. Nothing that
happens appears to be an intervention into the chains of natural
cause and effect. We know that things once ascribed to the direct
influence of God, or the workings of less powerful invisible beings
have natural causes. Where a natural cause cannot be found, we
assume, on the grounds of our experience so far, that one will
eventually be found. In part, however, we reject the supernatural
because there is no good evidence that it exists.

Forget that horrid old beggar woman. Look instead
at the Nazis. It seems that Hitler was a convinced believer in the
occult. He took many of his decisions on astrological advice. It did
him no visible good. He misjudged the British response to his
invasion of Poland. He was unable to conquer Britain or to make
peace. His invasion of Russia, while still fighting Britain, turned
his eastern frontier from a net contributor of resources to a
catastrophic drain on them. He then mishandled his relations with
America. So far as he was guided by the astrologers, I hope, before
he shot himself, that he thought of asking for a refund. It was the
same with Himmler. Despite his trust in witchcraft, he only escaped
trial and execution by crunching on a cyanide capsule made by the
German pharmaceutical industry.

Turning to practitioners of the occult, I see no
evidence of special success. They do not live longer than the rest of
us. However they begin, they do not stay better looking. Any success
they have with money, or in bed, is better explained by the
gullibility of their followers than by their own magical powers.

So it was with Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)—the
“Great Beast 666,” or “the wickedest
man alive.” He quickly ran through the fortune his parents had
left him. He spent his last years in poverty. Long before he died, he
had begun to resemble the mug shot of a child murderer. Whether his
claims were simply a fraud on others, or a fraud on himself as well,
I see no essential difference between him and the beggar woman who
cursed me in the street. He had advantages over her of birth and
education. But he was still a parasite on the credulity of others.

Nor can I see him as a thinker or writer of any
real value. The book that I am reviewing does its best to claim
otherwise. Its varied essays are all interesting and well-written.
Anything by Keith Preston, who wrote the fourth essay, is worth
reading. Mr Southgate has done a fine job on the editing and
formatting. But I found myself looking up from every essay to think
what a terrible waste of ability had gone into producing the book.
Was Crowley a sort of national socialist, or a sort of libertarian?
Was he a sex-obsessed libertine, or did he preach absolute
self-control? I suspect all these questions have the same answer. The
overall theme of the book is that he was a penetrating critic of
“modernity,” and each of its writers—all, in my
view, men of greater ability than Crowley—has done his best
to reduce a corpus of self-serving nonsense to a coherent system of
thought.

The truth, I think, is that, beyond a desire to
impose on everyone about him, Crowley had no fixed ideas, but he was
too bad a writer for this to be apparent. Take these examples of his
prose:

We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of
the earth are our kinsfolk. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter,
and delicious languor, force and fire are of us…”
[quoted, p.68]

The sexual act… is the agent which
dissipates the fog of self for one ecstatic moment. It is the
instinctive feeling that the physical spasm is symbolic of that
miracle of the Mass, by which the material wafer… is
transmuted into the substance of the body. [quoted, p.151]

In the second of these, he seems to show an
influence of D.H. Lawrence—or of the sources that made
Lawrence into another bad writer. In the first, he has certainly been
reading too much Swinburne. I confess that I have not read anything
by Crowley beyond the quotations in this book. Having seen these,
though, I am not curious to look further. He was a nasty piece of
work in his private life, and a victim of early twentieth century
fashion in everything else.

But enough of Crowley. He is less interesting
than those who think him interesting, and I will end this review by
discussing them. There are, broadly speaking, two main strands in the
opposition to the New World Order. Both agree about the emergence of
a global ruling class that is both unaccountable to and hostile to
the mass of ordinary people. Its political oppressions are mandated
by a set of transnational and opaque institutions. It exploits us
economically through several hundred privileged corporations, and
through a fiat money system managed by half a dozen central banks. It
discourages open discussion of its goals by spreading lies through
the mainstream media and the schools and universities, and by
imposing these lies through corrupted systems of law and
administration.

Where these two strands disagree is the over
cause of the New World Order. For one, it is the final result of the
Enlightenment. Rationalism has stripped from us all sense of the
transcendent. It has left us alienated and atomised, and unable to
throw off our oppressors, or even fully to appreciate that we are
oppressed. The answer is to go back to the pre-modern sources of
wisdom—whether these are religious or ethnic, or frankly
mystical. It is to cast off the mirage of equality, and to embrace
natural hierarchy. For the other strand, the enemy is a
counter-Enlightenment. This is rolling back all the gains made since
about 1650—freedom of speech, freedom of trade, equality
before the law, objective science, among much else—and
replacing these with a restoration of the kind of system that has
kept us, for much of our existence as a thinking species, from
opening our eyes and looking properly about.

Now, I fall within this second strand. I believe
that most philosophical and political wisdom is to be found in
Epicurus, Sextus Empiricus, Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, John Stuart
Mill, and the others of their kind. There are valuable insights
beyond this progression. But these are the writers who asked the
questions that matter. If their answers are often conflicting, they
all dance close by the probable truth. The Enlightenment was our
salvation. My only complaint about progress is that we have so far
had too little of it.

I think there is a necessary connection between
my philosophical and my political views—libertarians and
scientific rationalists: if you are one, you need also to be the
other. But the geography of the human mind is too complex for lines
to be drawn where I think they ought to be. Not every scientific
rationalist is a libertarian. Not every mystic or reactionary is an
authoritarian. There are admirers of Crowley—and of Friedrich
Nietzsche and Julius Evola, and of Hegel and de Maistre, and of many
other thinkers for whom I have no time—who are libertarians
in the only sense that matters. I see no point in exploring their
motivations, as these are both mixed and continually shifting. But,
if they do not share my opinions as I have explained them, they are
undoubtedly committed to a radical scaling back of the established
order, or to its complete overthrow. And they do not share my dislike
of the New World Order because they are not in charge of it. Their
traditionalist utopias are not mine. But they will not conscript me
into them. They do not wish to stop people like me from living as we
please.

The two strands of the opposition may never agree
about the significance of Aleister Crowley, or about the primacy of
scientific rationalism. But there is much else to discuss. In
particular, there is much that each can gain from trying to
understand the assumptions and concerns of the other. And there is
much generally to be gained if conventional libertarians can reach
out and give moral support to the decentralist tendencies within
traditionalism. I may not be impressed by the subject of this book.
But I am impressed by the ability of its writers.

Sean Gabb is the author of more than forty books and around a
thousand essays and newspaper articles. He also appears on radio and
television, and is a notable speaker at conferences and literary
festivals in Britain, America, Europe and Asia. Under the name
Richard Blake, he has written eight historical novels for Hodder &
Stoughton. These have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek,
Slovak, Hungarian, Chinese and Indonesian. They have been praised by
both The Daily Telegraph and The Morning Star. He has produced three
further historical novels for Endeavour Press, and has written two
horror novels for Caffeine Nights. Under his own name, he has written
four novels. His other books are mainly about culture and politics.
He also teaches, mostly at university level, though sometimes in
schools and sixth form colleges. His first degree was in History. His
PhD is in English History. From 2006 to 2017 he was Director of the
Libertarian Alliance. He is currently an Honorary Vice-President of
the Ludwig von Mises Centre UK, and is Director of the School of
Ancient Studies. He lives in Kent with his wife and daughter.

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